New issue of Stuck on the Map by Dan Murphy!

Dieter Rams Ten Commandments of Design

Posted on Sep 08, 2009 - 07:15 PM

* Good design is innovative
* Good design makes a product useful
* Good design is aesthetic
* Good design helps us to understand a product
* Good design is unobtrusive
* Good design is honest
* Good design is durable
* Good design is consequent to the last detail
* Good design is concerned with the environment
* Good design is as little design as possible

Avo

101 Cassette Labels

Posted on Aug 21, 2009 - 07:55 AM

New media mavens and New York New Museum associates Rhizome created a marvelous, if raw, resource on Wednesday with the publication of 101 Cassette Labels. Contemporary cassette culture is a wonky, contrary game that emphasizes time taken and objects treasured, and the wealth of cassette labels sprouting from remote scenes in places like Michigan and Ohio manage to stay very weird despite the homogenizing force of the Internet. Click through on some of Rhizome’s links in the article, and be sure to look at the comments at the end for even more esoteric suggestions and some interesting counterarguments about cassette fidelity.

Ben Chasny’s information addiction

Posted on Aug 17, 2009 - 07:23 PM

The psych guitarist and Six Organs of Admittance frontman Ben Chasny makes a lot of sense in a recent treatise about file sharing and information addiction. There’s nothing we don’t already know in his narrative about relentless bitstreams of accumulation, of folk who have hard drives full of music that means nothing to them beyond the fact that they got it for free and put it in their library, but to see Chasny’s point written out, and delivered with piercing clarity, is a sincere shock to the system. It’s easy to rib the romantics and pedants who think music has to be held in one’s hands, that it is manifest as a precious object, but it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t listen to it it doesn’t really exist.